Edition:

Rhymes of passion

After a series of acclaimed TV roles, Daniel Craig made the leap to Hollywood in the Road to Perdition and now stars in the highly anticipated literary movie Ted and Sylvia. Here, he tells Gaby Wood about Gwyneth Paltrow's troubled performance and how he never liked Ted Hughes much anyway

I meet Daniel Craig outside the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, which is closed for the time being while they hang their next show. I am standing calmly by the railings when Craig walks up to me, fast, shakes my hand and carries on, barely breaking stride. We've arranged to go for a walk, it's true, but there's no dallying with him, no dithering over direction or discussing of destination. We talk about the war - a subject about which Craig is very exercised. He has been reading every newspaper and is addicted to the rolling news. American imperialism, the fact that no one listens to dissenting voices despite the marches and demonstrations, the dubious role of Dick Cheney's company in the planned reconstruction of Iraq, the selective quotation of Hans Blix's report by Jack Straw - all of it falls within minutes into the span of Craig's hyperactive attention.

'You know those West End shows that are obviously awful, and they edit the reviews to make them sound good? Like "A phenomenal... evening... out" when what they've really said is "phenomenally bad... worst evening of my life... not worth going out for..." Well, that was what Jack Straw was like reading out Hans Blix!' Craig surges purposefully forward through the park, his hands gesticulating in
spasms of urgency, his talk littered with expletives, until we've reached the other side and he stops dead in a crowded street. 'Where are we going?' he asks, suddenly bewildered. 'Harvey Nichols?'

Harvey Nichols - which, since we are nowhere near it, I assume he means metaphorically - was not the plan, so we march back into the park again until we find a place to have tea and scones.

This feverish personality is, according to his friend William Boyd, who directed him in The Trench, 'One of our best actors.' On screen, he exerts a supreme amount of control, releasing emotions in the most subtle of ways. His face is slightly rugged without being steely - in some lights it looks handsomely sculpted, in others that of a life-worn boxer. His eyes are a lethal blue - when you see them on celluloid they seem too pale and too strange not to carry some meaning. Now, as he talks, they are animated or watery or screwed up into a grimace. Craig is a commanding, powerful actor. Seen back to back, his film roles show off an extraordinary range, and an exceptional grasp of rawness and complication.

Many will know him best as the hapless Geordie Peacock, living hand-to-mouth in the TV series Our Friends in the North. Others will have seen him more recently, playing Paul Newman's cold, murderous son in Sam Mendes's Hollywood gangster movie, Road to Perdition. In between, he has portrayed a schizophrenic (Some Voices), a physicist (Werner Heisenberg in the TV adaptation of Copenhagen), an army sergeant during the Battle of the Somme (The Trench), and Francis Bacon's sado-masochistic lover (Love is the Devil). Last year he appeared on stage opposite Michael Gambon at the Royal Court, where Stephen Daldry directed him in Caryl Churchill's new play A Number - Craig played three different cloned brothers and each was recognisable as soon as he appeared on stage. Later this year he will be seen in a Roger Michell/Hanif Kureishi film, The Mother, in which his character has an affair with a 65-year-old woman, and, early next year, in the role that is set to indisputably reveal his talent to the world, he plays Ted Hughes in the biopic Ted and Sylvia, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath.

They have just finished shooting the film when we meet. So far, Craig has only seen a brief trailer made for the cast from the rushes. 'It looks like it's going to be a sad movie,' he says, 'but what can you do about that?' The shoot itself didn't take place at the happiest of times: Paltrow's father had died not long before. 'That brings a reality into it,' Craig says. 'It was very upsetting. I don't think the filming process itself was upsetting - it was just too big a deal. I don't know how she coped really. She did brilliantly. And her mum was there, Blythe Danner. She plays Plath's mum in the movie.'

Craig's is a role he is understandably a
little nervous about. 'There's quite a bit of pressure riding on it,' he says. 'And also just the whole shit that goes with it - you know, the hatred directed at Ted Hughes. People are still scrawling "pig" on his grave.' Craig clearly has a good deal of sympathy for Hughes - he has firm beliefs about the reasons behind his behaviour towards Plath, though he's not sure how much of this will come through in the film, as it is told through Plath's eyes. I ask him if he always has to sympathise with the characters he plays, and he says not at all, it's just that he feels no one can judge the relationship between Hughes and Plath because 'ultimately, within a relationship there's an unknown, which is just about those two people. You know, when you have friends who split up, the worst thing you can do is get involved.'

It's an indication of Craig's intelligent brand of acting that he has humanised the famous couple, turned them into intimates, while standing back and allowing them some privacy. 'I spoke to this wonderful lady, Elizabeth Sigmund, who was a friend of Plath's - The Bell Jar is dedicated to her - and I said, "Come on, you've got to tell me. What were they like when they were together?" She said, "You couldn't put a cigarette paper between them. They were inseparable." And that meant so much to me. I genuinely believe that even if he did have affairs, it was part of a relationship - he wasn't a serial polygamist. He was in love with Sylvia, and he was always in love with Sylvia.'

As a young boy, Craig heard Hughes give a reading at the girl's grammar school down the road from him in Liverpool. But far from being in awe of the man, Craig found the performance hilariously boring. 'I mean, bless him, he didn't read poetry particularly well. It was just this monotone crap.' Craig puts on a Northern accent so low and gloomy you can barely hear words between the mumbles: 'This is called Crow. Crow sits in... duh duh duh... Blood and otters... Birth and death... thank you very much.' He bursts out laughing.

In truth, though, Craig has examined Hughes's accent a little more closely than that, and found in the voice itself a minor tragedy. 'If you listen to it,' he says, 'his accent does not exist. Nowhere on earth does that accent exist - it's absolutely peculiar to Ted Hughes. He came down from Yorkshire and went to Cambridge and, of course, he got rid of it. What he did was he flattened it out. It's his interpretation of what a posh accent should sound like, but not too posh because he's from the north. It's bizarre - and heartbreaking. Feeling that you have to mask it and not mask it.'

I ask Craig what's happened to his own accent - there's certainly no trace of Liverpool left. 'Exactly!' he cries. 'Exachtly! What has happened to it? It's gone!' He says he arrived in London when the 'classless' accent was still a fairly posh one. 'Believe me, I know. I even grew my fringe long.' Looking at his feathery blond crew cut this seems quite unlikely, and he explains: 'Well, you know, when I left drama school it was Merchant Ivory or nothing!' But did he get those sorts of roles? 'Nah. I think they figured out that I was common as muck.'

Craig was born in Chester in 1968, and brought up in Liverpool. His mother went to Liverpool Art College and his stepfather, who appeared in his life after his parents divorced when Craig was 'four, five, six' (he is vague on this), is a painter called Max Blond. He's clearly close to Blond, and sees a lot of his father, too. 'We're off to Dublin next weekend to watch the last game of the Six Nations,' he says. Craig is a secret rugby fan. 'It's not the coolest thing in the world to like, but I've been watching it since I was a kid.' He used to wonder what his dad's weekends in Dublin were all about, and now he knows: 'Your feet don't touch the ground.'

His mother's social life revolved around the Liverpool Everyman, where she knew set designers and other people, at a time when Julie Walters and Bernard Hill were performing there regularly. Craig used to go along with his older sister and became fascinated by the theatre.

'Then, by the time I was 15 and I was failing miserably at school, my mum obviously thought, "Why won't this smelly eating machine leave my house?"' She saw an advertisement for the National Youth Theatre and, before long, Craig was in London being given choice acting roles at 17 and doing odd jobs while he applied to drama school.

Craig married a Scottish actress and singer when he was 23 and has a 10-year-old daughter. He is divorced and has been living in northwest London for the past seven years with Heike Makatsch, a German actress he met on the set of a European film called Obsession. Makatsch is something of a star in Germany, and has made a few films here. What promises to be her British breakthrough is due out later this year - Richard Curtis's directorial debut, Love Actually.

In many ways, however, 'breakthrough' roles are just a cliché. Craig, for example, has done some work in Hollywood and there was 'Oscar buzz', which came to little, around Road to Perdition. But he knows his best work might not necessarily
be generated in the city of angels. Though he's wary of being too rude about Tomb Raider, he makes no bones about the fact that he couldn't find anything challenging in his role as Angelina Jolie's boyfriend. He likes it when 'The whole thing comes together - reading the script, meeting the director, and thinking: this is interesting because it's a bit weird. The thing is, you start getting, let's say a bit more famous, and suddenly you get more scripts offered to you. So it all gets a bit more confusing and I'm not very clever, you see.'

The key here is that Craig chooses parts because they're 'a bit weird', and it's clear from his performances that he thrives on that edge. In Love is the Devil, his character is said to have 'a combination of amorality and innocence'. In one scene, he and Derek Jacobi (who plays Francis Bacon) get undressed, slowly, ritually. Jacobi bends over the bed, Craig winds a belt around his fist. The camera closes in on them as he picks up his cigarette and stubs it out on Jacobi's flesh. Craig exudes a touchpaper combination of tenderness and violence. In The Trench, there is a key scene in which the buttoned-up sergeant Craig plays offers one of his men some of his wife's homemade jam. The soldier refuses and Craig tries to persuade him, thrusting the jar into his face. As he sits back down, dejected and furiously spooning the jam into his mouth, the camera lingers on him, his face expressing all the lost warmth of home. The film's director William Boyd is particularly proud of this scene, and says Craig has 'an amazing ability to express emotion of the most poignant kind as well as the most vehement kind. Not all leading men have that - they can do the tough stuff, but they can't always do both.'

Craig says that taking risks remains more important to him than making money. 'I'd like to be able to just earn money and stay comfortable. I mean, you could price yourself out of the market. And you can do too much, and you can be on the screen too much, and can I have the rest of your clotted cream?'

It's incredible Craig is so controlled on screen, because you get the feeling he must find it hard to sit still. His fingernails are short, he fidgets, his hands working overtime to cover up his face as he cringes over something he's said. He's constantly undercutting himself with a little alter-ego voice that takes the piss and everything is expressed at a mile-a-minute. He says if you become bitter and twisted as an actor you've lost the point, and when I ask what the point is, he begins an interrupted disquisition. 'Well, I do it because I find it fulfilling and because I believe it has a place in the artistic...' then he splutters, crumbs falling out of his mouth along with the inevitable expletives. 'I do it because I like showing off!' He explodes into laughter.

Whenever he feels he is in danger of saying something too actorly, Craig says it's 'all bullshit really', or some such, but in between these apologies, he regularly makes observations that range from the sensitive to the subversive. For instance, when I ask him about playing Ray, the schizophrenic in Some Voices, he says that a psychotherapist offered to show him around the Maudsley hospital as part of his research, but Craig felt he couldn't justify the intrusion for the sake of method acting. Instead, he spoke to the psychotherapist, and found ways to understand what schizophrenia feels like, things schizophrenics and so-called sane people might have in common. Later, we end up talking about music - he has been trying to get his daughter to listen to the Rolling Stones, but she's stuck on the Beatles - and he says he hopes there will be a new political voice in music. Not only that, but he hopes he'll have no connection to it whatsoever, because only that way will it really represent a younger generation.

He says he never used to have a diary, and now he thinks it's a sign of getting old that he feels this new responsibility to have an affinity with dates. Still, a little chaos reigns. When he shows me what he calls his diary, I see it's just a blank book in which he's scrawled some days and numbers. I suppose you never know what might happen next. Craig is only 35 and yet he's waiting to be kicked up the ass and called 'oldie', because he's so keen for life (and culture and politics) to renew itself. He welcomes rebellion, courts it even.

When we've finished our scones, he gives me a lift to the tube in his clapped-out-and-proud Saab. There's a paperback copy of some Ted Hughes poems on the floor. I accuse him of planting the book, but I know it's the kind of thing he'd never do. It's so verging on pretension that if anything, he'd be embarrassed it was there. Craig laughs and chucks the book over his shoulder, where it lands, somewhere in the back, with a clunk.

About this article

Daniel Craig: The tougher the better

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 26 April 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 10.37 EDT on Sunday 27 April 2003.
It was last modified at 10.37 EDT on Wednesday 8 October 2003.
It was first published at 10.37 EDT on Wednesday 8 October 2003.